Tiny lives
My husband was away for work recently and had taken our car with him. While he was gone I caught the train into the city with our 21-month-old son. He screamed nearly the whole way, with intermittent periods of quiet while he tried to leap from my lap to the lap of the passenger sitting next to us. In the pram, walking through the city, he continued to wail. Like a crazed person I muttered irrationally; “why are you doing this to me?”
My hair was greasy, my eyes were red and there were stains on my shirt; I was clearly not ok.
My lovely GP asked how I was doing and although I didn’t plan to tell her, it all poured out. I had been seeing a fertility specialist. I was pregnant, but my hormones weren’t rising the way they should, and the specialist was quite sure the pregnancy wasn’t going to make it. I was waiting to miscarry.
I felt in control of the well of emotions rising up inside me as I explained what was happening. “I’m ok,” I assured her, lying. “It’s a very early pregnancy, five weeks.”
She looked at my son, then at me, and with a reassuring smile she said “you’re doing a really good job.” Like all acts of true kindness, her words hit me like punch. I lost my equilibrium and started to cry.
She allowed my tears to flow without comment and after a beat I wiped my eyes. I managed to muster my energy to complete the task we were there for — getting my son his flu shot — and moved forward into the day. I sent a silent prayer to the gods when he fell asleep in the pram on the train coming home.
Later, as I recounted the experience in the doctor’s office to a friend, I told him that I believed the grief I was experiencing was the price one pays to be able to carry and give life. He didn’t see it that way. “There’s a baby on its way to you,” he said “an old soul, a strong child.”
I’d like to have believed him and not to have felt that the life bleeding out my womb was just a cruel fact of nature.
Earlier in the year, as part of my job analysing the media, I spent three days reading news reports about new born babies dying ‘preventable deaths’ in hospitals in my city. At a dinner for mother’s group on the same day, I listened as two friends told of miscarriages they’d suffered while trying to conceive again.
Days after the incident in the doctor’s office, as the miscarriage began to take it’s course, I tried in vain to retain my grip on logic and remain rational. But my betraying body — surging with hormones — left me bitter, wrung out, and more than anything else, deeply and profoundly sad.
The sadness felt indulgent. The miscarriage meant very little at the early stage it happened, a loss of what was essentially a poppy seed sized ball of cells, it could have been a late period if I wasn’t so vigilant of my cycles.
But grief is a rising tide bringing behind it the strength and force of all the losses felt in a life. I was awash with it. I was not just sad for this particular poppy seed; I cried for my first baby, the baby I miscarried at ten weeks. The baby who had a name, and a heartbeat. I cried for all the women I know who’ve experienced this kind of grief, and worse grief still. I cried for all the babies, all the tiny lives never lived.
